America Doesn’t Have Time For More Tech-Challenged Politicians During my 35 years of covering the technology industry, I have seen firsthand how companies have tried to keep an arm’s-length relationship with the government. With some rare exceptions-the Pentagon’s cooperation and collaboration with industry brought us the internet-Silicon Valley has generally tried to avoid federal and state...

Burned-Out Americans Are Helping Wellness Tourism Flourish “People are burning out a lot faster these days at work,” says Melissa Bruno, founder of Invigorate Travel. Bruno calls herself a “lifestyle travel consultant,” not a travel agent. She sees herself as someone who not only books travel for you, but also offers you a way to change your...

An Unconventional Model: We’re In The People Business (And So Are You) This founder distilled the questions of business down to “Are my people happy? Are they growing?” Here’s how his “people-centric” strategy has worked...

By Adam Lashinsky for Fortune Data Sheet The very best technology companies excel at saying no. This was, after all, the mantra of the late Steve Jobs, who liked to say that Apple said no to more good ideas than it said yes to. He prized focus and discipline almost as much as smooth edges and elegant presentations. With all the dealmaking hullaballoo going on right now in tech and many other industries, I got to thinking about the importance of saying no. After all, the M&A game is all about saying yes: Yes to combining, yes to doing more, yes to debt, yes to growth for the sake of growth. So it was that two nuggets of negation jumped out at me Monday night, both from a tech-industry conference that The Wall Street Journal is hosting in Southern California. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, suddenly a showbiz-industry pipsqueak valued at a mere $55 billion, said his service would maintain its focus on entertainment. Netflix, which seemed batty when it started commissioning quality TV shows and the like after starting out as a DVD rental service, will eschew news and sports, said Hastings. (Read and watch coverage of The WSJ’s conference here.) Similarly, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, had a demonstrative response when asked about his company’s self-driving car strategy. No one would have thought to ask that question if Microsoft competitors Apple and Google weren’t both gaga over autonomous vehicles. Nadella’s car strategy, according to The WSJ’s estimable Greg Bensinger, is Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing business. Translation: Microsoft is saying no to this fad and instead will hope...

After Years Of Warnings, Internet Of Things Devices To Blame For Big Internet Attack On Friday, a series of massive distributed denial of service attacks disrupted access to major internet services including GitHub, Twitter, Spotify, and Netflix. The attackers apparently used tens of thousands of hacked internet of things devices-household appliances such as digital video recorders, security cameras, and internet routers-to generate a massive amount of digital...